"I want you and Hicks at Mercy General. Search and Rescue found a woman out in the hills. It could be Gina Kemmer. It doesn"t look good."
"Where did you find her?" Mendez asked.
They stood inside the doors to the ambulance bay in the Mercy General ER with the leader of the Search and Rescue team, Tom Scott, forty-something and built like an NFL linebacker-a mountain of muscle with the chiseled face of a cartoon superhero.
Hicks came back from the trauma unit with a grim face and a nod. "It"s her."
"She was about fifty yards off a fire road up in the Dyer Canyon area. The dog found her. We were up in that general area looking for a guy. My young dog took off. He"s just in training. I was gonna give him h.e.l.l for that. So I went after him and when I came over the rise, here he was trying to drag this woman by the arm. He"d pull on her and bark at her and pull on her some more.
"Thank G.o.d for him. There"s a lot of chaparral and scrub up there. We wouldn"t have seen this lady. The chopper had gone over that area earlier and didn"t see anything."
"What kind of shape is she in?" Mendez asked.
Scott rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Bad. GSW to the left shoulder. Looks like a through-and-through, but red and hot and full of pus. Broke her right ankle like nothing I"ve ever seen. Snapped both bones clean. You could turn her foot clear around."
"Oh my G.o.d," Mendez said.
Hicks went a little pale at the vivid description.
"Severely dehydrated. Severely hypothermic," Scott went on. "She was absolutely delirious when we got to her. Hallucinating, the whole nine yards."
"Is she conscious now?"
"No. I"ll be really surprised if she makes it. I don"t know what all she went through out there, but it was terrible. She had what looked like rat bites on her hands, on her legs, on her face. And stink! Like we pulled her out of a Calcutta sewer."
"Did she say anything when you found her?" Mendez asked. "Did she identify a perp? Anything?"
"No. She was babbling. Incoherent. By the time we got her in the chopper, she was out. I"ve never seen a BP that low and still have a pulse."
He nodded out the gla.s.s doors at the Search and Rescue vehicle where his partner was waiting. "I"m gonna go get my paperwork in, but I"ll meet you guys out at the scene and show you everything."
"s.h.i.t," Mendez said as he watched the big man walk away. "We can"t catch a f.u.c.king break."
"Us?" Hicks said, looking back toward the trauma unit. "You should see her. If you"ve got any favors to call in with the big guy upstairs, it"s time to use them."
Mendez crossed himself. "G.o.d help her. G.o.d help us. The sooner the better."
67.
The place where Gina Kemmer had been found, dragged from the brink of death by a German shepherd dog, was situated in a scrubby, rocky no-man"s-land between several properties, among them Zander Zahn"s home, Marissa Fordham"s home, and the Bordain ranch. The spot was back off the fire road Zander Zahn had taken nearly every day over the hills to begin his morning with his free-spirited friend, Marissa, and her daughter.
There was nothing quiet or secluded about the area now as daylight was fading. The fire road was clogged with vehicles from the sheriff"s office. Portable lights had been set up to focus on the spot where Gina had been found by Search and Rescue, and ran farther back off the road to what had at one time been a group of ranch buildings, now long abandoned and reduced to little more than sticks.
"We followed the drag marks back here," Tom Scott said loudly to be heard above the three helicopters circling the area-one from the SO, and two up from a television stations in Los Angeles. "It looks to me like she crawled out of this old well. Whoever shot her dumped her down there and left her for dead. That"s some h.e.l.l of a will she"s got, getting herself out of there."
Mendez and Hicks both added the beams of their Maglites to the hole in the ground. The well was no more than five or six feet across and probably twenty feet or so down to the most horrific, stinking pile of garbage Mendez had caught a whiff of in a while.
"Jesus," he said. "If the fall doesn"t kill you, the smell will."
"People have been throwing their garbage down this hole for years," Scott said. "Probably half the people in this valley do it. There"s nothing to stop anyone coming up here. Kids from town party out here too. There"s a lot of beer cans around. s.h.i.t, I used to come up here when I was in high school."
He shined his light into the well and specifically on the rusty bent lengths of rebar cemented into the wall one above the other as a crude ladder. "I"ll bet she caught her foot on one of these rungs on her way down. That"s how she snapped that ankle like a toothpick."
"There"s things moving down there," Mendez said.
"It"s a friggin" rat smorgasbord down there," Scott said. "The rats get down in there through burrows or tunnels in the earth and come into the well where the old concrete has fallen away. G.o.d knows what all"s down there. Rats, mice, snakes, scorpions."
"G.o.d knows, but we"re going to have to find out," Hicks said. "Are you sure sure she was down in there?" she was down in there?"
"I can"t swear to it, but that"s what it looked like to me. And by the way that girl smelled-she was down in there for a while."
"She"s been missing since Wednesday afternoon," Mendez said.
The big man was impressed. "Wow. If this gal pulls through after all that, I"ve got to meet her. She must be something."
Funny, Mendez thought, he wouldn"t have said so, having met Gina Kemmer. He would have pegged her for the more timid of the two friends. You never knew how people would handle adversity until push came to shove.
Hicks went over to snag one of the crime-scene team to send him down the hole.
"You couldn"t pay me to go down there," Scott said.
Mendez laughed. "With those shoulders, you wouldn"t fit, man."
"Good! I got no truck with mice. Mice come at me, seriously, man, I"ll scream like a little girl."
"It takes a big man to admit that, Tom."
The CSI came with Hicks, protesting. "Are you f.u.c.king kidding me, man? You want me to go down there?"
"You"re a crime-scene investigator," Hicks said. "There"s a crime scene."
"I don"t get paid enough for this."
"You"ve got to take that up with the county commissioners," Mendez told him. "In the meantime, I want to know if there"s any evidence down there."
"Watch out for the mice!" Tom Scott called down after him as the investigator made his descent.
"f.u.c.k you!"
The Search and Rescue leader laughed, then stood back and looked around, sobering.
"Seriously, man, this would be a lonely place to die."
Zahn"s place was maybe a quarter mile or more over one hill. Marissa Fordham"s house probably half a mile to the south. The Bordain ranch was even farther away to the north and west. n.o.body would hear you scream up here. No one would hear your cries for help coming up out of the well. There was nothing up here but rabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes.
It wasn"t hard to figure why someone had brought Gina Kemmer up here to kill her.
He turned again to Tom Scott. "You didn"t find any sign of our missing math genius?"
Scott shook his head. "Nope. Nada Nada."
It was hard to picture Zander Zahn shooting someone. But it was even harder to picture him stabbing someone, and he had certainly done that. Where the h.e.l.l had he gone?
But anybody living out in this area could have known about this spot. Anybody who hiked these hills. Anybody who might have taken a long walk with Marissa Fordham.
"You guys owe me big time," the evidence tech said, making his way back up the ladder with a big brown paper evidence bag hooked over one arm.
"Whatcha got there, Petey?" Hicks asked.
"Black clothes with what looks to me like dried blood. Looks like they were drenched in it."
Scott pulled him up the rest of the way out of the hole like he was a toy and set him on firm ground. He opened the bag and Hicks reached in and pulled out a large black sweatshirt that was rumpled and stiff. They all shined their lights on it.
"Drenched in it," Mendez said. "Somebody took a f.u.c.king blood bath."
And odds were good the blood that someone had bathed in was Marissa Fordham"s.
"Gentlemen," he said. "We"ve finally got ourselves some evidence."
68.
"We"ve finally got something," Dixon said. "Hallelujah."
"I"ve got deputies canva.s.sing the area residents to find out if anybody saw anything Wednesday night," Mendez said, shrugging out of his coat. "It"s the freaking wilderness out there, but maybe we"ll get lucky.
"Has there been any word on Gina Kemmer?" Hicks asked.
"She"s critical," Dixon said. "It"s anybody"s guess if she makes it through the night."
"She made it this far," Mendez said. "She should have been dead out there three times over."
"Let"s hope she"s still got some fight in her," Dixon said.
"Do we have someone on her room?" Mendez asked. "The killer is the only one in the state who isn"t going to be impressed with her story of survival."
"The state?" Dixon said. "Try the country. I"ve got the networks on my a.s.s for interviews. I"m told there"s hardly a hotel room to be had in town. Between Marissa"s murder, Haley, Zander Zahn, and Gina"s story, the eyes of America are on us. Again."
"Our killer is going to start getting twitchy now," Vince said. "If he wasn"t already. It was one thing to leave a four-year-old behind with the potential to ID him. It"s something else to have a grown woman able to do it. He"s going to start feeling cornered now. He"s made too many mistakes."
"Darren Bordain was pretty twitchy today," Mendez said. "He refused a photograph, refused a polygraph. And his alibi for the night of the murder is Gina Kemmer, who has been conveniently missing."
"He certainly didn"t like being in the spotlight today," Vince said. "From his body language, I"d say he"s hiding something."
"He could have been involved with Marissa," Hicks said. "He could have believed he was Haley"s father. Maybe he found out he wasn"t. Maybe he found out Marissa never had a baby."
"And she never would have a baby," Dixon said. "I spoke to the pathologist today. She couldn"t say when, but Marissa Fordham had had a hysterectomy at some point in her life."
"That would certainly p.i.s.s me off," Campbell said. "Finding out after four years of paying blackmail that not only is the child not mine, it"s not even hers?"
Mendez nodded, trying the scenario out. "Bordain finds out. He"s furious. He snaps. He kills her. His mother made a big deal out of Marissa-the daughter she never had. He sends her the b.r.e.a.s.t.s to say "Here"s the f.u.c.king daughter you never had. She was a fraud and I killed her.""
"That fits well," Dixon said. "Too well. Darren Bordain is a smart guy. Would he do something so obvious as send those b.r.e.a.s.t.s to his mother in the mail? I"m still leaning toward misdirection with the b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Someone"s playing with us."
"Vince, what about Steve Morgan?" Mendez asked. "Did he talk to you?"
"Yeah, he did. He"s a cagey b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Vince said. "I"ve known some tough nuts in my day, but this guy doesn"t crack. He gave me a couple little glimpses inside, then shut the door."
"But could he be a killer?" Dixon asked.
"I"m not sure," Vince admitted, still turning the interview over in his head. He was exhausted from the mental game. His brain hurt from the effort. He could feel himself flagging.
"There"s something in him that makes him want you to believe he could be that rotten," he said. "A lot of self-hatred."
"What did he say about knowing the number of stab wounds the vic had?" Hicks asked.
"Lucky guess."
"My a.s.s!" Mendez barked.
Vince shrugged and spread his hands, wishing he had something more definitive to say. "I don"t know. If he did it, if he knew that number-which would be unlikely-why would he say it?"
"To poke us in the eye," Mendez said. "He knows we don"t have anything on him."
"He admits he wasn"t where he said he was on the night of the murder," Vince said. "But he wouldn"t tell me where he was, either. He was with another woman, but he isn"t going to give her name up unless he absolutely has to. And at this point, he doesn"t."
"Let"s say he was with Marissa," Mendez said.
"But why would he kill her?"
"She threatened to tell Sara."
"So what?" Vince said. "Sara has been pretty well convinced for a year or more that he"s cheating on her. She got closer to Marissa to try to prove it. He knew that. What would be the point of him killing her?"